La Famille Renouard (The Renouard Family)

Art Historical Context

Created in 1801 by the French draftsman and printmaker Augustin de Saint-Aubin, *La Famille Renouard* captures a multigenerational family through a series of delicate profile portraits. The etching presents men, women, boys, and girls arranged in a quiet, linear composition that emphasizes individual likenesses while suggesting familial bonds. Working at the dawn of the Napoleonic era, Saint-Aubin recorded the sitters with the refined restraint characteristic of late-eighteenth-century French graphic art. The print is an impression of the first of three states, allowing viewers to appreciate the crisp, untouched lines produced by the etching process. In this intaglio technique, acid bites the design into a copper plate, enabling the artist to achieve fine detail and subtle tonal gradations that were especially prized for portraiture. Such works circulated widely among cultivated collectors, serving both as personal mementos and as demonstrations of refined taste. Housed today in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints, this anonymous gift from 1924 preserves a vivid record of early-nineteenth-century domestic life and the enduring appeal of profile portraiture in French art.

About the Artist

Augustin de Saint-Aubin · 1736–1807

Comment on works: Illustrator; Engraver